Automated machinery is used in a variety of industries, such as manufacturing, water treatment, energy production and distribution, and other settings. The chief advantage of automated machinery is that the amount of oversight, labor, and expertise is reduced, as compared with machinery that is not automated. Automated machineries are typically controlled by low level standalone processors (such as PLCs) running operating systems like Ladder Logic, which open and close circuits in order to manipulate machinery. Labor requirements are further reduced when the low level standalone processors are integrated into a high level network which synergistically gathers and distributes data from all automated machinery via a software platform capable of large scale control. Such a platform can conduct tasks like archiving historical trends, monitoring operating conditions, and evaluate alarm events. Monitoring programs and related hardware control devices integrated with the automated machinery are often referred to in the industry as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.
The SCADA industry developed the concept of alarm events that are designed to monitor operating conditions and alert the appropriate responders to “out-of-tolerance” conditions in order for corrective action to take place. These alarm events initially consisted of data values like “On” or “Off” or a numeric limit that a value was not to exceed. When the responder is made aware of the alarm event he or she would acknowledge the alarm, marking it as a condition whose responsibility for resolution has been accepted. Over the years the alarm event concept has been significantly enhanced to include a vast range of attributes like priority, elapsed time, severity, etc., resulting in an unlimited range of ways to process such events.
Situations arise where appropriate responders to alarm events are not easily located, especially in plants that are not manned on a 24-hour basis. In such an instance a plant may have to cease production at the close of business unless there is a mechanism in place capable of alerting key personnel about operationally critical issues that require a response. Hence, the development of a class of products whose sole purpose is to notify appropriate personnel regardless of their physical proximity to an event. It is critical for the notification product to “find” the appropriate person wherever he or she is located, to have a backup notification plan in case the first person is not available to respond, and to provide essential requisite data necessary to resolve the alarm event. Such software is referred to as “remote alarm notification software.”
Known remote alarm notification software products allow designation of personnel to be notified in a sequential fashion (i.e., if person A does not respond to the alarm, notify person B). However, these alarm notification products typically have predetermined alarm strategies and their underlying logic pre-coded and embedded into the product, and lists of personnel to be notified in response to alarms listed in sequential order in a table. Changing the logic of the strategies or the ordered listing of personnel typically requires cryptic line-by-line changes to the embedded coding. This results in a long development and deployment cycle as well as intensive maintenance during the lifetime of the product. Once deployed, making modifications to the table is resource and time intensive, and incurs significant risk due to the mission-critical nature of the application. Moreover, complex systems may require a variety of different strategies and tactics to handle different types of events, and these may have to be changed frequently. Creating multiple strategies and tactics and changing them once created are also very resource and time intensive tasks that are not easily done.
What is needed is an improved system and method that address these and other problems of known products and methods by providing more flexible workspace environment systems and methods that allow a user to create, develop, configure and test complex notification strategies and tactics workflow processes quickly and easily, that afford escalation rules that are flexible and enable the workflows to be easily altered to accommodate changing circumstances, and that afford a user interface and underlying logic that makes the system and method easy to learn and use. It is to these ends that the invention is directed.